Axe

From Wild World Wiki

The Axe is one of the basic tools available from Tom Nook's store. He will sell it to you for 400 Bells. The axe is used for cutting down trees (leaving tree stumps behind). After being used for some time, the Axe will break. You can tell how close your axe is to breaking by the notches that appear on it in the 3D realtime image. The deeper the notch, the closer to breaking point.

By completing a trading sequence you can recieve the upgrade, the Golden Axe, which functions in the same way as the regular Axe, but will never break.